


254. midnight trips

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [276]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 22:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10523283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: "Someone's here," Helena whispers, and she isn't lying.





	

Helena scrapes her spoon around the edge of the can of beans, picking up the last cold droplets, and then says nonchalantly: “Someone’s here.”

Sarah goes still but can’t hear anything. She has no idea if Helena is joking – if this is her idea of a fun time, pretending there’s someone outside of the tent. She really doesn’t know Helena at all; the woman whose tongue is wrapping all the way around the spoon she’s holding is a complete stranger. But Sarah needs her, because Sarah needs Felix alive and well so much that her bones ache.

“What do you—” she starts, and Helena says: “Shh.”

Sarah _shh_ s. Outside: crickets. No footsteps. “What do you mean, someone’s here,” she says more quietly.

Helena puts the can of beans down on the ground, cocks her head. “Footsteps,” she says. “Outside. Heavy boots. Man. Training, because he is very quiet. Bad man.” She looks back at Sarah, expectant. In the bar, with Leekie, Sarah had said: if you follow us, I’ll sic Helena on you. Leekie had known she was serious. Here, in this moment, Sarah doesn’t know if she was serious. Helena has beans in the corner of her mouth. Was Sarah serious?

“Do you want me to kill him for you,” Helena says.

Outside a branch cracks. Every muscle in Sarah’s body believes, now, that there is someone out there. Of course Leekie sent someone after them – if Sarah and Helena find Duncan, and they don’t turn him in—

Helena’s thumb is pushing absentmindedly at the back of the spoon. She’s still looking at Sarah. If she’s blinked, sometime in the last minute, Sarah hasn’t noticed.

“No,” Sarah says.

Helena frowns. “He will follow us to Swan Man. Scavengers wait until predators find the meat, and then they steal the meat. Vulture Man outside will do this. I can make the problem go away, Sarah.”

“No,” Sarah says again.

God, it would be nice. She can’t stop thinking that. Helena would leave the tent, and when she came back all of Sarah’s problems would be gone. She could do that over and over for Sarah forever, as long as Sarah gave her beans and let her sleep in Sarah’s old sleeping bag. That’s a terrible thing to know about a person – about Helena and, more damning, about herself. That she’s tempted. That it feels like it would be easy.

“If he – does anything,” Sarah says, “then you can kill him. Alright?”

“Anything,” Helena says slowly.

“You know,” Sarah says. “If he – attacks us, or some shit.”

Helena blinks. “Okay,” she says. Her grip on the spoon loosens and she lets it clatter into the empty can of beans. She burps. “Thank you for dinner, _sestra_.”

“Sure,” Sarah mutters. “Look, we’ll – we’ll find Swan Man, and then we’ll sort this, yeah?”

Helena hums. She jams a hat on her head, over her ears, and studies Sarah from underneath it. Sarah shoves a hand through her hair subconsciously, as if it will rattle her brain back into shape and she’ll stop considering it. She felt this way once she learned to fire a gun; once her hand knew the shape of it she kept reaching for it, over and over again, to fix all her problems. She tugged it to the DYAD like a teddy bear. She took it from a dead man to face down cops.

She tried to fix Helena with it. That didn’t work.

Helena has procured one of the spare blankets and has wrapped herself in it, a small fuzzy huddle of a woman, and just a minute ago she’d offered to kill a man with a spoon. She could be Sarah’s gun. Sarah would just have to ask her, and she would do it.

“Alright, lights out,” Sarah says. “Early start tomorrow.”

They settle. Sarah’s face tilted towards Helena’s face, until Helena clicks the lantern off and they’re both gone. Then Helena is nothing but faint rustling noises, the sound of breathing that is thisclose to familiar. Sarah’s eyes are adjusting to the dark, and she doesn’t close them. She keeps getting the feeling that when she closes them, Helena will leave.

She falls asleep anyways. She dreams herself Helena, watching her sister breathe, fumbling for the silver shine of the spoon and letting herself into the sharp cold night. Outside her breath plumes silver. There’s a car parked close by; she can hear the engine purring. She settles her hand around the handle of her weapon and moves purposefully through the woods, into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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